I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review

podcast. Happy New Year to you all. It's January 2024, and as always I hope you use some of your downtime over the holidays to read something

from our top ten list perhaps or a book that's been sitting on a pile in your home waiting for just the right moment to crack open.

I can tell you what I read over the holidays because I write down every book I finish in a little journal.

I'm one of those people who likes to keep track of everything I read and everything I watch.

In that way, and maybe only in that way, I'm much like this week's guest, who to my mind is one of the more famous practitioners of culture consumption logging.

Every year Stephen Soterberg, the incredibly prolific director,

publishes on his site, Extension 765, a detailed day-by-day list of

every book he's read, every movie and TV show he's watched, every play he's attended.

I've read these lists for years.

I've gotten great pleasure from them

and I wanted to have Stephen on to talk about the books.

Let's turn to that conversation now.

Stephen Soderberg, welcome to the Book Review podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Stephen, at least on your site it goes back to 2009. You've been doing this list for quite a while. Why did you start? Why did you want the public to see this?

Well, I was trying to draw attention to my t-shirt business and

this seemed like the most obvious. Turned out didn't really move the needle very much but it was for me just

an exercise in creating a personal calendar of what was happening in my life during that period.

So for me, it really just become something if I'm to look back on it I can chart

based on what I was looking at or reading that year where I was, like where my head was, what I was doing work wise.

It's to me a kind of low impact, non-lethal way to orient my memory, which I find as time goes on, and especially because of the

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